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By Ciaran Thapar
2 June 2019 Show Purposes I Accept

The way young people use social media is having a direct impact on their lives, both online and off. For his All City column this
week Ciaran Thapar reports on how these platforms are changing the game, for good and bad

While spending time with gang members in the South Side of Chicago to conduct
fieldwork for his forthcoming book, sociologist Forrest Stuart would regularly
check Twitter and Instagram. He’d be surprised to find that the young men he
was hanging out with, often in perfectly mundane situations, were posting pre-
prepared images and videos of themselves wielding guns.

“I discovered all this flexing on social media,” he tells me over Skype. “I’d be
standing right next to these guys and realise they were posting things that were
nothing to do with what we were actually doing.” Some of the young men didn’t
own and had never used a gun. They simply borrowed them to stockpile photos
and videos of themselves holding weapons, later curating an intimidating social
media profile that they would drip feed onto the internet over the coming days
and weeks.

© Tristan Bejawn

Drill artist Digga D has found a young, engaged audience through social media,
despite some of his videos being banned

“I’d be driving them across town in my car, and when we’d pass a rival block
they’d start taking selfies out the window, pretending they were on their way to
do a drive-by,” Stuart continues. “Another time, in a cold Chicago winter, I was
sat with a young man who was babysitting his little sisters. We were in his living
room watching music videos on the television. But when I checked Instagram, he
was on there posting photos pretending to be stood in the blizzard outside
protecting his block.”

It is no secret that social media platforms are shifting human behaviours, habits
and interactions all over the world. People are increasingly able to use digital
profiles of themselves to extend or invert their physical realities, and thus
manipulate their social, professional and moral worlds for all sorts of benefits
and incentives: the prospect of meeting a new lover, the lure of branded money
from sponsors, the endorphin-hit of likes and shares, and chase votes and
political power.

But the younger you are, the more you are a digital native — someone born into a
world where the social norms around you are disproportionately defined by the
blurring interaction between online and offline experience. In the UK and
elsewhere, there is now a growing broader intrigue among parents, educators and
policy-makers about the presence of social media in young people’s lives.

The verdict is split: between seeing the trend positively, in light of things like the
democratisation of information and educational opportunities, and seeing it
negatively, with regards to the mental health problems and social awkwardness
potentially brought about by excess screen time. In any case, the sheer volume of
the phenomenon, and its generational slant in terms of the intensity of usage
across age groups, is undeniable. As a House Of Commons paper released earlier
this year by the Science And Technology Committee states: in 2015, 24.1 per cent
of 15-year-olds in the UK spent more than six hours, outside of school, online,
compared to an OECD average of 16.2 per cent; 94.8 per cent of 15-year-olds
used social media sites before or after school – a number that is likely to have
risen since.

There is now growing intrigue among parents, educators and

policy-makers about the presence of social media in young
people’s lives

“Generally, and this applies to kids across the race and class spectrum, social
media is becoming a new forum for working out the same kinds of identity issues,
popularity issues, in-fighting issues and transition-into-adulthood issues as
before,” Stuart explains. “Kids used to work these things out in the lunch hall at
school, or in gossip networks over the phone, or between first and third periods.
Now these conversations have been taken online,” he continues. “If before you
had spaces to try out or perform identities and wear different hats – the tough
kid, class clown, jock, soccer player – in the past you could go to school, perform
your identity, then go home and take that hat off.

“You could go back to being goofy, or funny, or behaving like a loyal immigrant’s
son with your family. Now you have to perform these things online, but it has a
very different function to the lunch room setting: stuff online becomes sticky and
durable. It’s harder to disprove and move on from. Lots of people are looking at it
and commenting on it. If you wanted to be seen as an athlete last month, the
ability for you to transition into a new identity is made more difficult because of
the mounting evidence about you being someone else,” he explains.

© Tristan Bejawn

Earlier this year, Stuart, who is now a professor at Stanford University, recently
wrote a paper entitled Code Of The Tweet: Urban Gang Violence In The Social
Media Age, in which, like most of his contemporary work, he focuses on social
media use among young people in poor, black, inner-city communities and how
that usage plays a uniquely involved role in the intergenerational and
longstanding gang beefs that have evolved in Chicago over decades. His
forthcoming book, Ballad Of The Bullet: Gangs, Violence And Urban Culture In
The Social Media Age, will be a comprehensive dive into this subject matter after
several years of field work. Similarly, Jeff Lane’s recent book The Digital Street is
a thematically related work of ethnography, looking into the role of social media
in young urban life in Harlem, New York.

“We can trace the kind of obsession of young marginalised youth to social media
to this current historical moment of austerity,” Stuart explains. “I don’t believe
it’s a coincidence that so many of the other ways in which young people could
have derived self-worth, and benefitted from rights-of-passage into adulthood in
the past, are closing up. It’s more difficult to go out and get the kinds of affirming
and secure jobs people used to be able to get. In the US, for example, there has
been a rise of low-wage, precarious service work. In poor communities, the street
drug economy is not what it used to be.

“In the Eighties and Nineties if you were poor and young, you’d hit puberty, join
a gang, work your way up that gang, make good money and then become a shot
caller. That path, that stability, it’s gone now. Combined with economic austerity,
and the sorts of hyper-policing we are seeing take place all over the world, the
experience of being a young person in an urban environment is changing. Then a
new technological economy comes along, and shows young people they can make
a name for themselves.”

It is not a coincidence that social housing projects in the South Side of Chicago
are where the lyrically violent, digitally active rap genre of drill music was first
conceived at the start of this decade, before cross-pollinating over the internet to
the estates of South London in 2014. Over the past few years, sonically the
London genre has sped up to absorb grime’s faster tempo, and thus morphed
into a distinctly British sound and subculture that is beginning to colonise
YouTube algorithms and streaming playlists, as well as adapt to take centre stage
in mainstream recognition.

‘The question for everyone on social media – adults too – is: how
do you cut through the noise?’

Some of the most drill successful artists, such as Skengdo & AM and Digga D,
among many others, now simultaneously battle attempts by the criminal justice
system to censor their music, whilst enjoying exponentially growing fanbases
online, across the UK, and increasingly worldwide. The music, which thrives on
social media in the way that it is rapidly shared and contributes towards
sustaining (entertaining, if problematic) back-and-forth rivalries between
different territorial groups, has thus risen on both sides of the Atlantic out of a
comparable context of 21st-century poverty, historic social neglect and the digital
world’s gripping prevalence amongst inner-city communities.

“In this new influencer economy, it is a mischaracterisation to suggest that these

dynamics are unique to young, poor or gang-affiliated kids. So many people are
online, and there is so much noise. So the question for everyone – adults too – is:
how do you cut through the noise?” Stuart poses. “It might just be a kid who is
trying to be popular at their school, but it might also be an artist who is trying to
stand out and stay relevant. Every channel owner, anyone who is trying to make
it in this digital economy is facing this. And how you break through the noise is
directly related to the resources that have available to you. For some young
people in the inner-city, who live in poverty with few resources, it therefore
becomes a competition about who is able to do the craziest thing. Who has the
biggest gun? Who is willing to video themselves walking through their rivals’
territory?” he continues.

I ask why he thinks there is a difference between how adults and young people
navigate their self-worth and identity. “As adults, we potentially have more data
we use to say to ourselves, ‘Yes, I am a worthy person’”. For example: I know I’m
a professor, I know I’ve won awards, so I have evidence telling me that I am
worth something. But young people are just starting out. They don’t have ways of
proving they are a worthy person yet, especially if they are poor. So when
someone comes online and says to them they aren’t special, and more people
come and comment right away saying the same thing, it creates an avalanche of
critique. Kids find it hard to disprove the criticisms being thrown at them. When
a child is poor there is a whole world saying they are worthless, they are invisible.
If they go online and people are saying the same thing it’s going to be difficult for
that not to affect you and make you do certain things,” he continues.

“When I’ve spoken to men who have served long prison sentences, they often say
to document your criminality back in the day was to go against the code,” says
Craig Pinkney, a criminologist at University College Birmingham and a leading
urban youth specialist in the UK, whose PhD focuses on social media, gangs and
youth violence in Birmingham – England’s gun crime capital. “But now this has
changed. Being quiet actually means you’re irrelevant. Young people who are
marginalised and invisible, all they have is themselves and their postcode. If it’s
the only way you can be heard, why not go on social media and rep your area?”

As both an academic and youth work practitioner working on the front lines of
dealing with the UK’s rising epidemic of violence, Pinkney argues that, from an
educational perspective, adults need to take much greater steps to understand
social media. “We need to learn about what is happening before we go and
lecture young people about how they should be using social media” he says.

“Start with the social media companies. On Panorama last year, they interviewed
the person who invented limitless scrolling. He said the aim isn’t to make users
addicted, but conceded that one of the main objectives is to keep consumers
using platforms. So, really, are they making people addicted to their platforms?
Are young people getting more addicted? These technologies are creating
environments dominated by narcissistic behaviour,” he continues.

I ask him what educators and youth workers ought to be focusing on. “I don’t
think social media has to be a bad thing, and I also don’t think we should censor
anything because it will just push young people onto the dark web and into
spaces that are even more hidden. I think this is more about identity. The
dangers of social media aren’t the core issues. Young people’s identities, their
popularity and self-image, are” he says.

“Why is it that some young people feel that they need to get half-naked to get
likes? Why do some young men feel they need to act in hyper-masculine ways to
get likes? In that instance, the education we provide needs to be about
understanding what masculinity is; or how to develop self-esteem and confidence
from other sources. Distorted forms of these ideas are leading young people to
social media to document their lives in a particular kind of way that can then be
damaging. We need to be thinking of other ways for young people to get positive
affirmation.”

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